‘Time Fades Away’ (1973) [archive review from 2005]
What an incredible portrait of an artist under pressure! After the huge success of ‘Harvest’, Neil was expected to grind through a seemingly endless tour playing to massive, expectant crowds. This live album chronicles some moments from that tour & not always the best ones. What a brave decision to release a rough live album containing all new songs directly after a world beating success. The songs are not his finest, but they are truly perfect examples of songs written under immense pressure & the burden of great expectation. That is to say under the pressure of a now enormous fan base expecting him to equal or better 'Harvest', while he is being driven into the ground with the nightly grind of live shows, in a new city almost every day & living out of suitcases. This album is rough as guts but should be cherished for capturing the absolute truth of a moment in time. Neil deserves plaudits for ‘keeping it real’ & making no attempts to clean it up, or smooth it over (or bury it for that matter!) Neil’s’ voice shows all the strain of the months of live performance & the band nearly buckle under the pressure of performing new material to those expectant & often critical and impatient audiences. Who even has time to rehearse when you travel all day & play at night? Some of these songs sound like the band first heard them at sound check that afternoon. Somehow though, against massive odds, it works & I love it.
The title track is a fast, countrified boogie about a middle aged mans broken down relationship with his drug-dealing son. It has an energetic, speed-freak abandon in the performance & Neil seems to be running on not much more than nerves. It is not a great song & the lyrics are sloppy & vague, but the sadistically gleeful feeling & energy carry it along. Who is this guy? Not the guy who sang that lovely ‘Heart Of Gold’, surely? ‘Journey Through The Past’ is a brief, teasing return to ‘Harvest’ stylings, a sweet reflection on the past very much in the expected mellow, confessional singer-songwriter style & it gives a false sense of security after the disconcerting title track. “Ah! there he is again”, ‘Harvest’ fans sigh with relief, “glad that’s over!”. But no! in crashes ‘Yonder Stands The Sinner’, a cracked-voice rant digging at religious hypocrisy with lots of out of tune whoops & interjections from the band. I love it! It is rough, cheeky, indignant & full of life.
Track four ‘LA’ is the high watermark for me. A jet-black humoured & disturbingly gleeful imagining of the apocalypse in Los Angeles. With a slow but determined slop rock grind, the song builds unflinchingly in intensity as it progresses. The steel guitar pleads & the piano tinkles in a beautiful dance around an aching, fractured melody. 'Don’t you wish that you could be here too?' Neil accuses rather than asks. If it sounds as good as this on those shaking streets, then damn the fucking earthquakes, I’ll be there! 'LA' is inspired, under-rehearsed, make it up as you go rock & roll at its best. This is one of my very favourite Neil Young songs. Definitely in my top 5. ‘Love In Mind’ shows that the melancholy romantic still lurks somewhere behind the frazzled madness & it’s a brief & beautiful solo piano ballad to end side one.
Beginning side two, the autobiographical ‘Don’t Be Denied’ is a bit of a let down. Some critics feel it is the highlight of the album & a canon classic. I find it painfully plodding & melodically impotent. I also find the repetition of the one chorus line ‘don’t be denied’ ad nauseum, lazy & dull. I suppose though he was trying to hammer the point home with no pretty poetry or rhymes that might distract you & let you forget it. By the by, the theme of repetition (in different forms & with different meanings) is one he returns to often, most notably in the albums ‘Reactor’ and ‘Broken Arrow’, with varying levels of inspiration & success. ‘The Bridge’ is another short piano ballad with a pleasing melody & it is lovely & heartfelt if not a bona fide classic. It also has some sweet harmonica. Neils’ singing on the ballads is as sweet & beautifully pained as ever. The strain in his voice is not as evident as on the rocky shouters.
It is only on ‘Last Dance’ that the album tips over the edge of madness & total collapse that it had been brilliantly teetering on. It is even more rambling & sloppy than the rest of the album & without a tune to hold it together, it descends into utter confusion. Maybe that is where it had to go, as it does sum up the album perfectly in a way. It doesn’t make for good listening though. Listening to this track again as I write, there is some nice guitar work half way through & some stunning piano work, but overall it is still an ugly mish mash.
Where is the blueprint for this album in rock history? Where is the map to help listeners to navigate it? I just know that this is a vital & precious album for the circumstances it brilliantly captures & for what Neil bravely let it be where precious few others would have.
[Favourite to least - ‘LA’, ‘The Bridge’, ‘Time Fades Away’, ‘Love In Mind’, ‘Yonder Stands The Sinner’, ‘Journey Through The Past’, ‘Don’t Be Denied’, ‘Last Dance’]
The title track is a fast, countrified boogie about a middle aged mans broken down relationship with his drug-dealing son. It has an energetic, speed-freak abandon in the performance & Neil seems to be running on not much more than nerves. It is not a great song & the lyrics are sloppy & vague, but the sadistically gleeful feeling & energy carry it along. Who is this guy? Not the guy who sang that lovely ‘Heart Of Gold’, surely? ‘Journey Through The Past’ is a brief, teasing return to ‘Harvest’ stylings, a sweet reflection on the past very much in the expected mellow, confessional singer-songwriter style & it gives a false sense of security after the disconcerting title track. “Ah! there he is again”, ‘Harvest’ fans sigh with relief, “glad that’s over!”. But no! in crashes ‘Yonder Stands The Sinner’, a cracked-voice rant digging at religious hypocrisy with lots of out of tune whoops & interjections from the band. I love it! It is rough, cheeky, indignant & full of life.
Track four ‘LA’ is the high watermark for me. A jet-black humoured & disturbingly gleeful imagining of the apocalypse in Los Angeles. With a slow but determined slop rock grind, the song builds unflinchingly in intensity as it progresses. The steel guitar pleads & the piano tinkles in a beautiful dance around an aching, fractured melody. 'Don’t you wish that you could be here too?' Neil accuses rather than asks. If it sounds as good as this on those shaking streets, then damn the fucking earthquakes, I’ll be there! 'LA' is inspired, under-rehearsed, make it up as you go rock & roll at its best. This is one of my very favourite Neil Young songs. Definitely in my top 5. ‘Love In Mind’ shows that the melancholy romantic still lurks somewhere behind the frazzled madness & it’s a brief & beautiful solo piano ballad to end side one.
Beginning side two, the autobiographical ‘Don’t Be Denied’ is a bit of a let down. Some critics feel it is the highlight of the album & a canon classic. I find it painfully plodding & melodically impotent. I also find the repetition of the one chorus line ‘don’t be denied’ ad nauseum, lazy & dull. I suppose though he was trying to hammer the point home with no pretty poetry or rhymes that might distract you & let you forget it. By the by, the theme of repetition (in different forms & with different meanings) is one he returns to often, most notably in the albums ‘Reactor’ and ‘Broken Arrow’, with varying levels of inspiration & success. ‘The Bridge’ is another short piano ballad with a pleasing melody & it is lovely & heartfelt if not a bona fide classic. It also has some sweet harmonica. Neils’ singing on the ballads is as sweet & beautifully pained as ever. The strain in his voice is not as evident as on the rocky shouters.
It is only on ‘Last Dance’ that the album tips over the edge of madness & total collapse that it had been brilliantly teetering on. It is even more rambling & sloppy than the rest of the album & without a tune to hold it together, it descends into utter confusion. Maybe that is where it had to go, as it does sum up the album perfectly in a way. It doesn’t make for good listening though. Listening to this track again as I write, there is some nice guitar work half way through & some stunning piano work, but overall it is still an ugly mish mash.
Where is the blueprint for this album in rock history? Where is the map to help listeners to navigate it? I just know that this is a vital & precious album for the circumstances it brilliantly captures & for what Neil bravely let it be where precious few others would have.
[Favourite to least - ‘LA’, ‘The Bridge’, ‘Time Fades Away’, ‘Love In Mind’, ‘Yonder Stands The Sinner’, ‘Journey Through The Past’, ‘Don’t Be Denied’, ‘Last Dance’]
‘On The Beach’ (1973) [archive review from 2005]
Is this album really worth all the fuss? Is it really the holy grail we all made out, or is it just because it was for so long out of print & so many people had not heard the lions share of the album until 2001 (apart from the two tracks on ‘Decade’) & could only judge it by repute & desperate hope. Well I had this on LP & knew it well, so I hope my opinion is fairly balanced. I should also say that the release of the also long unavailable ‘Reactor’ did nothing to change my opinion of that album & as for ‘American Stars & Bars’, well I’m going to go town on that one later, so I think this album is worth a lot of fuss.
Starting with the perky ‘Walk On’, a rebuttal to his critics who had savaged him for ‘Time Fades Away’ & the ‘Tonight’s the Night’ tour probably, it is a disarmingly open & breezy first track which gives little indication of what is to come. Neil catches our interest with breezy pop so that he can have our full attention when he starts to scratch at sores. ‘See The Sky About The Rain’ is appropriately titled. It is foreboding; the rain clouds are coming & they stick around for the remainder of the album, lifting only in the dying verses of the final track. ‘See The Sky’ has some trite lazy rhymes, & doesn’t really hit its stride until mid song, but when it does, it is superb. The chugging organ combined with Neils’ wordless wailing & moaning is just sublime.
‘Revolution Blues’ is the crucial track on this album. A snaky, simmering, muted rock song where the repressed rage shockingly bursts to the surface. ‘I hate them worse than lepers & I’ll kill them in their cars’. Much has been made of the Manson references, but what interests me more than playing ‘spot the reference’ to those events, is the bravery & willfulness of writing a song from a murderers perspective & so soon after the events that it supposedly alludes to. Who else would have dared? Good taste has been questioned, but not in question are the quality of the song & the performance. R.B. has some of Neils’ most incisive & evocative lyrics & is a vocal tour-de-force. Every nuance & phrase is just right as he spits out the bile & indignation. Absolutely stunning.
‘For The Turnstiles’ is another perceptive, observant & wise reflection on the world around him & the concepts of fame & success. It has some lovely tight, high country harmonies & steel & banjo work. This song is brilliantly concise & its relative shortness & modesty do nothing to diminish its greatness. It is another great Neil lyric, with too many great lines to pick just one. Closing side one is ‘Vampire Blues’, the weakest track on the album. The song deals with pressing themes such as ecological exploitation & capitalist greed, but despite the noble intent & its function in the overall sweep of the album, it is not particularly interesting melodically & is a little too vague & plodding for mine. The vocal is a good one, with some humourous moments & the organ stabs work well, but it struggles to hold me after the two sinewy, toned performances directly before it. Strangely though, for a song with this title & theme, it is light relief before side two!
Richard Kingsmill said on JJJ in 1996 that the title track was the song his brother feels is the archetypal Neil Young song. He is probably right. It has a downtrodden plod, a melancholy, fatalistic tone & with lines like ‘the world is turning, I hope it don’t turn away’ and ‘all my pictures all falling, from the wall where I placed them yesterday’ it is pure Neil Young. He is the eternally blue boy whispering & moaning his woes into our souls where they resonate with our own. His voice slips up the register in the choruses & back down for the verses & it works a treat. I love the lazy bongos & the slow dripping guitar solo is supremely tasteful & oozes feeling.
‘Motion Pictures’ is so subdued it is almost as if Neil is turning his head away from us briefly & whispering to his ex-wife before once again resuming his focus on the listener in the next song. It is a hushed contemplation of & kiss-off to their failed relationship. There is some tasteful steel work again & this track continues the melancholic, reflective tone. It is subtly melodic, but has the hard task of sitting between the two sprawling & endlessly quotable epics sitting either side of it. Ultimately it is somewhat swamped. Which brings us to ‘Ambulance Blues’.
Attempts by Neil thus far in his career to end his albums with a supreme epic had failed in large measure. Think ‘Last Trip To Tulsa’ & ‘Last Dance’. Here though, the best is saved until last & this is probably rightly felt to be the greatest, most deeply textured & ponderable lyric of his career. A twisting acoustic, lyrical journey over ten minutes, it is Neils’ own ‘Desolation Row’ or ‘Tangled Up In Blue’. The lyrics are so loaded with vivid imagery & emotion that you could write a whole essay unravelling it. ‘Oh mother goose, she’s on the skids’. That line is perversely both hilarious & sad in equal measure. I love that line. It is a sort of ‘things ain’t cooking, in my kitchen’ moment; an unexpected savagely melancholy turn that has great effect when it hits. ‘An ambulance can only go so fast’; He realizes that sometimes even the best & most rapid help still takes time to arrive and sometimes it takes too long. Like Dylan’s ‘Tangled’, it drags us through several places, times & characters & conjurs a complicated web of moments & moods & points of focus. To complete the picture, a weaving, weeping violin tracing beautiful lines around the weary vocal.
'Ambulance Blues' holds interest despite its mammoth length & by the end Neil seems to be at relative ease with his world & with himself again. He seems to have been able to shake off his souls disquiet & sadness. There seems to be resolution with the 'hook & ladder' critics who had dogged him in recent times, offering to 'get together for some scenes'. He also rejects all the damaging rock star ego bullshit that many of his contemporaries had been engulfed by, realizing 'there ain’t nothing like a friend, who can tell you’re just pissing in the wind'. ‘On The Beach’ is always in my top 3 Neil albums at any given time, probably just edged out by 'Tonight’s The Night’ as his all time greatest album. It argues a great case for him on every level of his craft; as lyricist, social observer, singer, guitarist, composer; and there are few weak links. It is a cohesive & truly great album.
[Favourite to least - ‘Revolution Blues’, ‘For The Turnstiles’, ‘Ambulance Blues’, ‘On The Beach’, ‘See The Sky About To Rain’ ‘Walk On’, ‘Motion Pictures’, ‘Vampire Blues’]
Is this album really worth all the fuss? Is it really the holy grail we all made out, or is it just because it was for so long out of print & so many people had not heard the lions share of the album until 2001 (apart from the two tracks on ‘Decade’) & could only judge it by repute & desperate hope. Well I had this on LP & knew it well, so I hope my opinion is fairly balanced. I should also say that the release of the also long unavailable ‘Reactor’ did nothing to change my opinion of that album & as for ‘American Stars & Bars’, well I’m going to go town on that one later, so I think this album is worth a lot of fuss.
Starting with the perky ‘Walk On’, a rebuttal to his critics who had savaged him for ‘Time Fades Away’ & the ‘Tonight’s the Night’ tour probably, it is a disarmingly open & breezy first track which gives little indication of what is to come. Neil catches our interest with breezy pop so that he can have our full attention when he starts to scratch at sores. ‘See The Sky About The Rain’ is appropriately titled. It is foreboding; the rain clouds are coming & they stick around for the remainder of the album, lifting only in the dying verses of the final track. ‘See The Sky’ has some trite lazy rhymes, & doesn’t really hit its stride until mid song, but when it does, it is superb. The chugging organ combined with Neils’ wordless wailing & moaning is just sublime.
‘Revolution Blues’ is the crucial track on this album. A snaky, simmering, muted rock song where the repressed rage shockingly bursts to the surface. ‘I hate them worse than lepers & I’ll kill them in their cars’. Much has been made of the Manson references, but what interests me more than playing ‘spot the reference’ to those events, is the bravery & willfulness of writing a song from a murderers perspective & so soon after the events that it supposedly alludes to. Who else would have dared? Good taste has been questioned, but not in question are the quality of the song & the performance. R.B. has some of Neils’ most incisive & evocative lyrics & is a vocal tour-de-force. Every nuance & phrase is just right as he spits out the bile & indignation. Absolutely stunning.
‘For The Turnstiles’ is another perceptive, observant & wise reflection on the world around him & the concepts of fame & success. It has some lovely tight, high country harmonies & steel & banjo work. This song is brilliantly concise & its relative shortness & modesty do nothing to diminish its greatness. It is another great Neil lyric, with too many great lines to pick just one. Closing side one is ‘Vampire Blues’, the weakest track on the album. The song deals with pressing themes such as ecological exploitation & capitalist greed, but despite the noble intent & its function in the overall sweep of the album, it is not particularly interesting melodically & is a little too vague & plodding for mine. The vocal is a good one, with some humourous moments & the organ stabs work well, but it struggles to hold me after the two sinewy, toned performances directly before it. Strangely though, for a song with this title & theme, it is light relief before side two!
Richard Kingsmill said on JJJ in 1996 that the title track was the song his brother feels is the archetypal Neil Young song. He is probably right. It has a downtrodden plod, a melancholy, fatalistic tone & with lines like ‘the world is turning, I hope it don’t turn away’ and ‘all my pictures all falling, from the wall where I placed them yesterday’ it is pure Neil Young. He is the eternally blue boy whispering & moaning his woes into our souls where they resonate with our own. His voice slips up the register in the choruses & back down for the verses & it works a treat. I love the lazy bongos & the slow dripping guitar solo is supremely tasteful & oozes feeling.
‘Motion Pictures’ is so subdued it is almost as if Neil is turning his head away from us briefly & whispering to his ex-wife before once again resuming his focus on the listener in the next song. It is a hushed contemplation of & kiss-off to their failed relationship. There is some tasteful steel work again & this track continues the melancholic, reflective tone. It is subtly melodic, but has the hard task of sitting between the two sprawling & endlessly quotable epics sitting either side of it. Ultimately it is somewhat swamped. Which brings us to ‘Ambulance Blues’.
Attempts by Neil thus far in his career to end his albums with a supreme epic had failed in large measure. Think ‘Last Trip To Tulsa’ & ‘Last Dance’. Here though, the best is saved until last & this is probably rightly felt to be the greatest, most deeply textured & ponderable lyric of his career. A twisting acoustic, lyrical journey over ten minutes, it is Neils’ own ‘Desolation Row’ or ‘Tangled Up In Blue’. The lyrics are so loaded with vivid imagery & emotion that you could write a whole essay unravelling it. ‘Oh mother goose, she’s on the skids’. That line is perversely both hilarious & sad in equal measure. I love that line. It is a sort of ‘things ain’t cooking, in my kitchen’ moment; an unexpected savagely melancholy turn that has great effect when it hits. ‘An ambulance can only go so fast’; He realizes that sometimes even the best & most rapid help still takes time to arrive and sometimes it takes too long. Like Dylan’s ‘Tangled’, it drags us through several places, times & characters & conjurs a complicated web of moments & moods & points of focus. To complete the picture, a weaving, weeping violin tracing beautiful lines around the weary vocal.
'Ambulance Blues' holds interest despite its mammoth length & by the end Neil seems to be at relative ease with his world & with himself again. He seems to have been able to shake off his souls disquiet & sadness. There seems to be resolution with the 'hook & ladder' critics who had dogged him in recent times, offering to 'get together for some scenes'. He also rejects all the damaging rock star ego bullshit that many of his contemporaries had been engulfed by, realizing 'there ain’t nothing like a friend, who can tell you’re just pissing in the wind'. ‘On The Beach’ is always in my top 3 Neil albums at any given time, probably just edged out by 'Tonight’s The Night’ as his all time greatest album. It argues a great case for him on every level of his craft; as lyricist, social observer, singer, guitarist, composer; and there are few weak links. It is a cohesive & truly great album.
[Favourite to least - ‘Revolution Blues’, ‘For The Turnstiles’, ‘Ambulance Blues’, ‘On The Beach’, ‘See The Sky About To Rain’ ‘Walk On’, ‘Motion Pictures’, ‘Vampire Blues’]
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